The Crew

The crew of the Bon Ki is made up of three woman, highly skilled in their respective fields. The captain is, by necessity, an astrophysicist – the primary purpose of the mission is to gain new understandings and insights into the cosmos, and to that end the leader of the mission, the person with veto power, must be the person best able to understand and appreciate astronomy. Once the applicants had been restricted to females, Fatimah Marhn stood out as the obvious choice. Rising from academic obscurity in her early twenties with the publishing of her Observations, Marhn eagerly accepted scholarships to increase her knowledge and understanding of the cosmos. Since then she has worked with no less than three national space agencies. Her main contributions have been the re-classification of over fifty distant solar systems and her continual work on gravitational disruptions.

No mission of this magnitude and expense can focus on only one branch of science. The ship itself demands the presence of someone capable of understanding its design and maintenance. A person with both mechanical and computational experience, who could also run experiments for various scientists back on Earth. Enter Mary Anders – a programmer, systems engineer, and physicist who refurbishes old motorcycles in her spare time. Though younger than most of the applicants considered for the task, Anders’ enthusiasm and competency were determined to be equal to the task.

But who takes care of the crew? When designing this mission, everyone knew there would need to be a person with medical experience on board. They also knew that this opportunity was too great to waste without leaning more about the biological effects of simulated gravity on both the human body and other organic life. Rio J. Park then was an obvious choice, with her many decades of experience in environmental systems and horticulture, and her more recent services as chief medical officer for the Lunar colony.